Obama’s Many Unnecessary Interventions

My view is that Obama has done about as good a job as possible in managing the core task of his presidency: letting self-defeating global hegemony go. That required a balancing act – of intervention where absolutely necessary and caution elsewhere [bold mine-DL].

If Obama had governed this way, I would be more inclined to agree, but this description of the administration’s record hasn’t been accurate for years. Intervention in Libya wasn’t necessary, much less absolutely so. No U.S. or allied interests were threatened, but the U.S. and its allies went to war in Libya anyway. Despite some obvious early reluctance to be pulled into the Syrian conflict, Obama and senior administration officials were seeking to involve the U.S. directly in a foreign civil war as recently as eight months ago. The fact that this was avoided at the eleventh hour doesn’t change any of that. Obama has been slower in being drawn into foreign conflicts than others might have been, but he keeps being drawn into them because he hasn’t really “let go” of U.S. hegemony. If he had, he wouldn’t feel compelled to weigh in on the legitimacy of foreign governments or throw support behind popular uprisings in countries where the U.S. has little or nothing at stake, but he he has done just that for at least the last three years. Even though he seems to grasp that the U.S. isn’t able to do very much in many cases, he evidently can’t break the habit of treating foreign conflicts and crises as problems that the U.S. must have a major role in solving.

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23 Responses to Obama’s Many Unnecessary Interventions

“My view is that Obama has done about as good a job as possible in managing the core task of his presidency: letting self-defeating global hegemony go. That required a balancing act – of intervention where absolutely necessary and caution elsewhere [bold mine-DL].”

At least science fiction only hopes to foretell possible futures as opposed to untruths being masqueraded as actual current reality –

I agree that Sullivan overstates Obama’s non-interventionist credentials, but given that (a) McCain definitely would have been more interventionist and (b) Romney likely would have been more interventionist, I’m still inclined to say that Obama’s foreign policy record is better than either of the most plausible substitutes. And tragically, given the likely line-up of candidates for both parties in 2016, Obama is also probably better on foreign policy than any of his most plausible replacements (unless Rand Paul miraculously gets the GOP nomination).

I’ve posted this before, but I think the best way to summarize Obama’s foreign policy is [i]“the least intervention-prone that could realistically be produced in our political circumstance.”[/i]

I’ll also note that your one concrete policy disagreement with Obama is Libya. Saying that Obama might have gone to war in Syria doesn’t mean much. We should evaluate actions and consequences, instead of rhetoric. Though, I agree with you that Libya was unnecessary and dangerous, and that the handling of Syria was very poor. I just don’t think we’ll ever live to have a president like that.

Some critiques of intervention that I don’t often see made are the ones about (semi-)clandestine weapons shipments to various factions (Libya, Syria, possibly Ukraine) and (semi-)sanctioned drone attacks (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, etc.). The first one has a hugely destabilizing influence, and often the benefactors are less than admirable. The second one is troubling because it is direct US involvement that is apparently unreviewable. The recent Hirsch article goes into weapons shipments in some detail, and drones are Greenwald’s pet issue, but neither of these authors explore the international dimension. Hirsch’s shtick is exposé, and Greenwald’s focus is on the legal and civil rights facets.

And as a parting shot, I’ll say that I’ve never liked Sullivan’s analysis on anything. That he would write such a factually wrong statement with such bravado, and with so many buzzword-laden hooks, is par for his (first 9 only) course.

If Libya was blunder–and I’m not sure it was–it was an understandable one. At that moment, the pressure on the West to make up for all the years of propping up autocrats and dictators was immense. The picture of a young man who had sewn the Libyan, US, British, and French flags together waving it from a truck was emblematic of what we were after. As chaotic as Libya may be now, let’s recall, it’s not over.

And I’m with James: O’s big first term rookie error was the surge in Afghanistan. McChrystal,of course, had boxed him in with the leaked troop request, and it was clear from his time-limit Obama had been listening to people such as Rory Stewart, and it’s also true almost every president blows a big one in their first term (Bay of Pigs, Vietnam escalation, Mayaguez, Eagle Claw, Beirut, Iraq), but still, it was a mistake, and a big one.

I’m surprised people are so inclined to excuse Obama’s actions on Syria – attempted murder is still a crime, albeit not quite as grave as a successful murder. The Syrian civil war is also exactly the kind of quagmire you’d expect any sane US president to stay out of – high risk, low reward and with no real “good guys” among the warring parties. And that’s ignoring the fact that the US ill afford another Middle East adventure, or how the American people were overwhelmingly opposed to intervening in Syria. Ignoring the liberal hawks wouldn’t cost Obama much either, they strongly disagree with the Republicans on non-foreign policy issues and would only further discredit themselves by threatening to derail the larger Democratic agenda over a foolish, unpopular intervention.

Your one example of Obama’s “many” unnecessary interventions appears to be Libya. Does one mistake a bad foreign policy make? Sullivan even agrees on Libya. I think Obama deserves more credit for de-militarizing American foreign policy than you give him.

When I look nowadays at the consequences of this “balance”, I begin to doubt the sanity of the US foreign policymakers. The damage to the real (not contrived by doctrine-mongers) and legitimate American interests as the consequence of the Ukraine “policy” is enormous. It is this, claimed by Sullivan, “right balance” that is the main impetus to a real reformatting of the power…balance globally. I will omit here describing, even briefly, possible scenarios but it will take now some really gigantic “rests”, which, at this point, US or EU are not capable to provide anyway, to convince Russians (not the Kremlin elite) that it all was just a “misunderstanding”. Meanwhile Russia is marching to Asia and China, definitely, feels very happy because of that. I, on the other hand, don’t.

P.S. I agree with James, Libya was a brain-child of French passionate neocon Bernard Henry Levy and his buddy, who suffers from Napoleonic complex, Sarcozy. US was, effectively, forced into Libyan quagmire. On the other hand, US could have ruled out this involvement but she didn’t.

I’m not seeing the “many” interventions either. There is Libya. Which was wrong and did not serve US interests. But at least there was the fig leaf of a UNSC Resolution.

On the other side, Obama followed through on Bush’s withdrawal timetable in Iraq, and now he seems to be withdrawing from Afghanistan. Of course, those were inherited wars, not interventions of Obama’s making. The drone-assassination-special forces mini wars were also inherited, but Obama has done worse here, expanding and “legalizing” them. Syria never happened. Nothing, really, has happened in Ukraine either. Not yet anyway. At least in terms of military intervention. Obama is also trying diplomacy with Iran, much to the chagrin of the neo cons.

I think it possible, when all is said and done, and the record is reviewed from a historical perspective, that O’s Administration MIGHT be seen as the turning point, as the time period when the US stopped adding new commitments, starting phasing out some old ones, and, yes, generally began reconciling itself to the loss of its complete hegemony. Sure, there have been some reversas, an unnecessary “surge” and lots of intemperate rhetoric, but if Rome was not built in a day maybe it is also true that it can’t “unbuilt” in a day either. Backing off of empire, like building one, is a process, not an event.

If the American people were better informed and/or honest with themselves, they would see that Obama’s foreign policy has deviated little with his predecessor. He has been a war time president. Yes, it is true he did not start the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, but he supported the surge in Afghanistan, attacked Libya, and orders drone strikes in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan almost on a monthly basis. He will have been at war or waging war-like maneuvers for basically all 8 years of hs presidency. As Jeremy Scahill notes in his documentary “Dirty Wars”, Obama has expanded the national security state and orders covert operations in Africa and the Middle East very frequently. People who claim he is an isolationist are willfully ignorant. People who also claim he has been moderate are ill informed.

Mr. Obama gives every appearance of being captive to the last person to whom he has spoken.
If he has been adhering to any principled Foreign Policy that his Administration has formulated, or even fallen into, in the course of the last 6 years, he hasn’t show much interest in setting the nature of those principles before the American Public. Does anyone anywhere know what this President really is going to do about anything other than to let the government bureaucracies grind away and then provide them the same cover the Bush Administration did when they fail to perform or worse.
Is this how a President is to be judged: how well he provides cover for his bureaucracies?

“Mr. Obama gives every appearance of being captive to the last person to whom he has spoken.”

Not sure where you’re getting your feel for his “appearance,” but apparently it didn’t include his staring down Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over arming the Syrian rebels, which they supported, and he rejected.

It also doesn’t seem to include his over-ruling Secretary of Defense Bob Gates insistence that the Abbotabad compound be bombed, and his decision to send in the Special Forces instead.

What makes Obama worse than Bush II in the foreign policy department is that he ratified almost everything Bush II did, effectively institutionalizing it. And his people are as inept, ignorant, and reckless … one thinks immediately of the tour-de-force of incompetence mounted by Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

One thing that should be added to the analysis here is not only to think of the propensity to war in terms of a leader’s intentions, desires, or rational calculations, but also whether he contributes to or skillfully navigates away from an atmosphere and strategic alignment in which war can break out or escalate without anyone thinking this is reasonable or in the national interest. Think, especially in this anniversary year, of how WW1 started and the unexpected spark that set it off. Almost no one wants a shooting war of great powers in Ukraine, but Obama has contributed to a volatile situation that could turn into a conflagration through some event analogous to the assassination of Frank Ferdinand. Another thing to keep in mind is Stoessinger’s argument in Why Nations Go to War about how misperceptions of leaders contribute to wars. Is Obama accurately assessing Putin’s intentions, Russia’s strength (“a regional power”), the Kiev regime’s competence, and US capabilities? His and Kerry’s rhetoric and severe lack of diplomacy throughout this crisis inspire little confidence in this regard. Let’s hope Obama is not sleepwalking to war.

@ Flavius: We’ve approved arms supplies to some Syrian groups through third parties–twenty-year-old TOW antitank missiles through the “Friends of Syria” for example–but we’re not directly committing ourselves, we’re leaving our options open, and we’re not flooding the rebels with so many or the kinds of weapons as to create any certain outcome.

What we are doing is just enough so that if the rebels should win their war, we had something of a hand in it, which might (emphasis on “might”) mean some (emphasis on “some”) influence in the future.

What we aren’t doing is giving them so many weapons they’ll be tempted to sell them on the black market (see Chiang, ca. late 1940s, Somalia ca. 2006, etc.), much less are we fighting the war for them (see Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, eg).

Moreover, we’re not in so deep that whoever the next president may be finds his or her hands tied by considerations of how much we’ve already done.

The unpleasant truth is that Mr.Obama appears to have people desperate to avoid having him appear to be Jimmy Carter. (Note that those who would want to conflate the two wouldn’t be arguing for intervention versus nonintervention, but rather ineptitude and seemingly naive worldviews.) The Establishment wants intervention, so woe to the CIC who would defy that. (The War Powers Act has always been a shadow box where Congress tries to have the last word on military action.)

Carter failed to learn from Ford’s Mayaguez fiasco that military rescue missions need extremely careful planning and execution. In the Mayaguez incident, the US lost 41 military personnel (more individuals than we were attempting to rescue, in fact) and actually left three men behind alive, to be brutally executed–this after the Cambodians had already released the Mayaguez and its crew. Carter’s far-better-known debacle, Operation Eagle Claw, lost nine individuals, and failed to accomplish the mission.

Carter ordered one of the more aggressive military build-ups up to that time, deploying nuclear missiles in Europe, approved development of new weapons systems such as the MX missile, and–cowed by the incessant brayings of the military-industrial-complex–acceded to sharp increases in defense spending.

Even more consequential, Carter misread the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, believing it to be the opening gambit of a Russian march to the Gulf. He began the policy of arming the Afghan Mujahadijn–similar to what people are calling on Obama to do re Syria–and the results, I suspect, need not be explained here.

It is interesting, however, to note that when the Soviets moved into Afghanistan to counter Muslim insurgents, we aligned ourselves with the insurgents. Some two decades later, when the US invaded Afghanistan to counter Muslim extremists, Putin called George W. Bush to ask how he could help.